Archive for December, 2003

“Colloquia familiaria: a selection” is a digital archive consisting of several colloquia by Erasmus with introductory essays, interpretive questions, notes, as well as a brief discussion of current standards in electronic publication. Created by Jennifer Nelson, a University of Kentucky graduate student in Classics and Library and Information Science, this publication was intended to serve a number of purposes: first and foremost, we wanted to introduce intermediate Latin students to Erasmus’ colloquia. Beyond that, the goal was to showcase TEI-XML as a text-encoding practice that can increase the likelihood of long-term preservation of digital documents in the humanities, and that can accommodate the high standards of resource description found in library MARC (machine-readable cataloging) records. At present, this collection includes an excerpt from the initial “Formulae,” plus “A Lesson in Manners,” “The Girl with No Interest in Marriage,” “Inns,” and “The Abbot and the Learned Lady”. We do invite submissions, however, as we hope that this archive will continue to grow through the contributions of other Erasmus enthusiasts. This project was completed under the editorial supervision of Jane Phillips and Ross Scaife (Classics, University of Kentucky), with additional technical advising from Joseph B. Miller (Library and Information Science, University of Kentucky). All of these materials reside in a single TEI-conformant XML file whose presentation on the web in HTML format has been effected via TEI-XSL (release 3.0).